By rights, Thomas Cook's European rail timetable, and its worldwide counterpart, should have vanished long ago, a relic in the age of online information and Ryanair. But happily it survives. The company published its first continental timetable in 1873, well before the Orient Express began puffing east from Paris, and it is still publishing them in 2010, though Thomas Cook itself has gone through nationalisation and privatisation, and is now in German ownership. Six times a year, on thin brown-grey paper, it issues the times of trains around the world. Once a month it publishes a comprehensive schedule for Europe. You do not have to be an obsessive to find a sort of romance in its pages: imagining journeys on the overnight Stendhal from Paris to Venice, or the weekly through-carriage from Warsaw to Astana, out on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan. The Thomas Cook timetable reveals a train from Berlin to Sochi, if you want to take it; or the times of the new direct service from Sarajevo to Belgrade. There is a steam train in the Harz mountains in east Germany that will puff you up to the site of a former Soviet watchtower; and the Lusitania hotel express which leaves Madrid for Lisbon each night, just after 10. No low-cost airline can match that for interest, or for environmental sustainability, for the best thing about these timetables is that they now record a growing rail service, not a declining one. Britain still comes first in its pages, but the best trains now run elsewhere.

• This article was amended on 9 August 2010. The original referred to the Hartz mountains. This has been corrected.